– Introduction –
The CycloDS Evolution is made by Team Cyclops. Probably already known for their infamous Supercard clones, the CycloDS firmware, it was a shock when Team Cyclops announced that their next flash cart, the CycloDS Evolution would have features that no other cart on the market would have. Despite the fact that the team started off with clone products, it seems that they have taken a whole new approach. Their support is phenomenal. It has only been a week and a half since the release date, and there have already been 2 patches to correct bugs and suggestions that users have submitted to them.
The CycloDS Evolution does not come cheaply, it costs about $54.99, and that does not include the MicroSD card. With the high price, the obvious question is, how well does this cart compare with cheaper products on the market?
The CycloDS Evolution is a slot 1 cart that fits flush into the DS and the DS Lite. It claims to have features such as slowing down gameplay, cheating, and of course, full download play capabilities.
– Design –
The CycloDS Evolution comes in a very nice tin box with some nice designs and of course their site and the product name. It looks very professional. The first thought that came to my mind is that, the tin box looks extremely familiar. The CycloDS Evolution tin box is exactly the same as the tin box that came with the Chinese models of the DS Link.
The tin box is beautiful and it keeps everything nicely inside.
When you open the beautiful tin box, you have a nice piece of black foam protecting your flash cart, a MicroSD reader and of course the CycloDS Evolution. Upon first inspection, the MicroSD reader looks quite cheap, and is the same as the first generation MicroSD readers that came with the R4DS. Although they have an extremely bad reputation, the two MicroSD readers I have received with the two CycloDS Evolution carts work extremely well.
I don’t know how I ever lived without MicroSD readers.
New CycloDS Evolutions have begun shipping with these new MicroSD readers that are fairly sturdy.
When you first looks at the CycloDS Evolution, you may think that it looks like it is flush fitting and it fits great. The cart is perfectly white, and the sticker looks very professional. The MicroSD reader, although not spring-loaded, works very well. However, the CycloDS Evolution shares the same mould as the DS Link, the similarities are striking, the chip sticks out at the exact same place, the MicroSD reader is located at the same place, and the chips and parts of the PCB visible though the cheap plastic are located at the same place, the MicroSD reader is the same quality, and even the little MicroSD symbol at the back is the same. The carts build quality is very high, just like the DS Link, the plastic, although a little transparent at the back, is nice and hard. However, when inserted and removed from the DS, you notice that the CycloDS Evolution is not perfect. You must push extra hard to get the cart out. I am compelled to believe that the fault is from the extra thick sticker they have used paired up with the chip sticking out, causing a slight thickness issue.
There is no denying their similarities.
On August 14th, 2007, new CycloDS Evolutions appeared on the market, even though the chip is still sticking out, most of the thickness issue and well as bad contacts issue have been fixed.
– Software –
The CycloDS Evolution is another drag and drop flash cart. Therefore there is no patching software. All you need to do is drag the roms into the flash cart, and it will run. However, the CycloDS Evolution also has its own rom trimmer called the RSATrim (credits go to spen83 and Team Cyclops), which can be found here. This trimmer is special because it leaves the RSA encryption unlike older trimmers. This means that older trimmers would destroy the download play compatibility, whereas the RSATrim allows download play to work flawlessly even when a rom is trimmed.
The CycloDS Evolution has 2 megabytes of memory built in to store system files. Updates are done via .evo files, and they are very self explanatory and updates very fast. A nice feature they’ve added is that the file automatically deletes itself after the update.
– Use –
Just a quick video showing the CycloDS Evolution in action.
When turned on, a DS Lite with a CycloDS Evolution would go directly to the DS menu. The advantage of this is being able to choose GBA games or launch a slot 2 flash cart in GBA mode. When the CycloDS Evolution is chosen, you enter a menu similar to that of the R4DS, where three icons can be selected on the touch screen. From left to right, these icons are Games/Homebrew, Media, Settings/Misc.
The DS menu allows you to lauch GBA games, which is probably a feature that could have been included inside the CycloDS Evolution menu.
The menu is just beautiful.
It can be skinned quite easily too. (Skin made by TeamCyclops)
When the Games/Homebrew icon is selected, you enter a menu similar to the DS Link menu. In the center are 4 games with their icons as well as information. With the X button, you can toggle between seeing the original name that the developers set or to the name of the file itself. In the bottom, your firmware is displayed as well as a clock. The scroll bar works on touch, however, is not very useful unless you have at least twenty of thirty games.
Kind of reminds you of the DS Link menu doesn’t it?
When a cheat enabled game is selected while cheats are enabled for the CycloDS Evolution, then a popup will appear asking whether or not you wish to cheat. If yes, it will take you to a list of available cheats. Something to note is the fact that loading more than one cheat does not lag with the CycloDS Evolution, unlike other flash carts such as the R4DS. Also, currently, there is no way to manually insert your own cheats, you only get to cheat on the 300 or so games that Team Cyclops has enabled cheats on. Once you are done with the cheats, the word loading appears for no more than a second or two and the game is loaded.
When you click the Media icon, you are brought to a homebrew application called Moonshell. Needless to say, Moonshell is not created by Team Cyclops, and this review will not touch on the effectiveness of this homebrew application.
The last icon is Settings/Misc. This icon brings you to a menu that allows you to enable cheat codes, change the LCD brightness, boot a slot 2 flash cart and toggle the “Enhance Mode”. The Enhance Mode is a menu that can be brought up during any game by pressing A+B+X+Y+L+R. In the menu is the option to change the brightness of the LCD screen, turn slow motion on and off, and enable the not-yet released feature of real time saving and loading. The LCD brightness is extremely useful when you are playing for a long time, and it works for practically every game I have tried. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same thing about the slow motion. The slow motion feature is bugged and not complete, it is very inconsistent, and is usually broken with most games I have played.
Enhance mode is quite fun to play around with.
– Functionality –
For the few days I have been testing the CycloDS Evolution, I have not yet seen lag on any games. There have been no slowdowns on the Castlevania videos, nor have there been freezes while playing Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin. There have been no graphical glitches with Tony Hawks: Downhill Jam, nor have there been unusual load times for Animal Crossing: Wild World. Unfortunately I have only been able to get my hands on Made in Japan 1GB Kingston MicroSD memory cards, for this review, I can only say this is true with the Made in Japan 1GB Kingston MicroSD memory cards. However, there have been reports on various forums saying there have been none or minimal lag on slower memory cards.
I used a Made in Japan 1GB Kingston MicroSD card in this review.
The CycloDS Evolution’s bonus feature is support for SDHC (Secure Digital High Capacity) MicroSD cards. These SDHC memory cards are the newest memory cards on the market, they are currently 4GB in size, however, they can go up to 32GB in size. Even though they share the same dimensions as the MicroSD card, they are not compatible, thus these cards will not work with older MicroSD flash carts such as the R4. In terms of usefulness, we will probably not see cheap SDHC MicroSD cards in the market anytime soon. Once again, it is unfortunate that I am not able to locate an SDHC MicroSD card to test, however, I have heard that they run slower than the Made in Japan 1GB Kingston MicroSD, however, they are acceptable (credit goes to Zombie_X).
In terms of compatibility, I haven’t seen a single game that didn’t run. I have tested pretty much all the problematic games, and all of them run perfectly. In the previous patch there were a few games that couldn’t run, however, they were immediately fixed. I would not hesitate to say that this cart has 100% compatibility.
It seems like almost all the new flash carts can play Castlevania without freezing.
Homebrew is a piece of cake on the CycloDS Evolution. With the auto-DLDI patcher, you simply drag and drop your homebrew file, and the CycloDS Evolution will automatically patch the homebrew file with their DLDI and have it working. All the homebrew applications and games worked flawlessly, there was no need to patch or anything.
The most important tests I performed were the download play tests. Because the G6 team failed to meet their claim of 100% download play compatibility, I was skeptical of Team Cyclops’ claim. However, according to my tests, it is the real deal.
Working
Tetris DS
Club House Games
Mario Kart DS
New Super Mario Bros.
Nanostray
Bomberman Land Touch
Big Brain Academy
Elite Beat Agents
Meteos
Quickspot
Super Mario 64 DS
True Swing Golf
Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day!
Mario Hoops 3 on 3
Metroid Prime Hunters
Winning Eleven Pro Evolution Soccer DS
Not Working
NONE
As you can see, they all worked. According to Team Cyclops, Yoshi Touch & Go didn’t work before, however, with a quick patch, they were able to fix it. As stated in my G6DS Real review, if they are able to fix a download play game via a patch, it is very likely that they are able to keep up with the download play compatibility in the future.
A quick video demonstrating download play.
– Conclusion –
As you can already tell by the price tag, the CycloDS Evolution is not a cheap flash cart. It costs $54.99 without a MicroSD card, and would easily be priced at $70 when bundled with a 1GB MicroSD memory card. This is a high price in the current market because of the low prices of competitors such as the R4DS, because of this I had high expectations. Fortunately for Team Cyclops, their product did not only meet my expectations, it exceeded it.
Expensive but worth every dime.
The build quality of the CycloDS Evolution is very good. The plastic doesn’t feel cheap, and it shares the same design as the DS Link, which is a great. Thankfully, the features of the CycloDS Evolution are also great. The NDS compatibility is easily 100%, and of course they run without lag with a Made in Japan 1GB Kingston MicroSD card. Homebrew is easy because of the auto-DLDI patcher that Team Cyclops have included. And in general, many little features such as in-game brightness changing make this cart as winner. Not to mention the phenomenal support it has already received.
As usual, no flash cart is perfect, however, the CycloDS Evolution is pretty close to it. The only complaint I have is the fact that the sticker on the CycloDS Evolution is a little cheap, therefore it causes issues when inserting and removing the CycloDS Evolution from a DS or DS Lite.
It is kind of hard to insert.
In conclusion, the CycloDS Evolution is the new R4, it will sweep across the whole DS community and every user will, or at least should have one. It is easily the most feature rich cart on the market, and the performance is stellar. Although the price is slightly higher than that of the R4, it is worth every dollar. And if Team Cyclops keeps up with their amazing support, this cart will continue to be the best for quite some time.
In general the CycloDS Evolution is a great flash cart.
– Score –
Design – 4/5
Software – 5/5
Use – 5/5
Functionality – 19.5/20
Tilt – 5/5
Overall – 38.5/40
Special thanks to Team Cyclops for provid